I have a third-year electronics design project to essentially build a mp3 player. The specs are broad so there is room for ideas. Being a student, I would like to get insight on what possible ways I can go ahead with the project.
The basic specifications include:
- to play at least one type of audio file (wav format, for example)
- files read from storage device (flash drive)
- must have play/pause, stop, skip track, ffwd/rewind
- project must have it's own power supply and adjustable volume speaker
- project must display elapsed time of playing track
- No adruino

The last spec is an unfortunate one but understandable for the course. The power supply and speaker I have experience building and so do not require assistance with. However the rest is new territory. I have previously worked with Atmel (Atmega32 programmable chip) and understand a bit of assembly with that.

Any and all ideas with which components to use and how to set it up will be a great help. Thank you for your time!

If you have the option to avoid using MP3 file format- do.
Using MP3 requires: (a) a nightmarish complex dedicated decoder chip, or (b) a huge, bandwidth hogging chunk of complex code.

Just make a player that uses .WAV files, it's vastly simpler and sounds just fine.
Then you do not require a chip or complex algorithm to decode the data - just pump it to a DAC at a constant rate and that's it.
Your seek functions can be more elegant too- no decoder latency to deal with.